familypediawikiaorg-20200214-history
Help:Editing
~ ~ ~ ~ }} :This is a short tutorial on editing "Familypedia". For more detail, please see the Wikipedia tutorial, on which this was based. At the bottom of this page, Wikia now automatically displays a box from the Central (Community) Wikia, which may be more up to date in some respects. :If you'd like to try out the editing information which is explained here, please use the sandbox to play. Registration and logging in You can read and edit pages without creating an account or logging in. However, to create an account (which is free, greatly reduces ads, and gives you more anonymity if you want that), just click the " " link at the top right corner of any page. You only need a single login for all Wikia sites. Policies Copyright Do not submit copyrighted material without permission. The best content is usually written either from personal knowledge (which is not allowed on Wikipedia but is most welcome here) or through the synthesis of research from multiple sources. For a more detailed discussion of copyrights, see Wikia copyrights. Courtesy Wikia encourages an atmosphere of friendliness and openness. Members of the community are expected to behave in a generally civil manner. You should always assume good faith on the part of other editors. Other matters See Wikia policies and the terms of use for more information. Glossary *'Article''' - in a MediaWiki site an article is, strictly speaking, a page in - a page without any of the standard prefixes such as "Category", "Help", "Talk", and "Template", though it can have non-standard words followed by a colon and something else. The process that counts the number of "real" articles discounts pages that are merely "Disambiguation" or "Redirects" so that it gives a reasonably accurate indication of usable content. See its calculation at the top of the page. The resulting "net" figure is what is reproduced when a page includes the template: currently . The newer "Wikiastats" have a different definition, probably more realistic but distinctly lower. *'Edit summary' - Beside each edit box contributors are invited to type or paste an edit summary. It should give later readers (of the Page history, User contributions, Recent changes, or a few other pages) a good indication of what you have done (and maybe why), preferably enough for them to know whether they want to open the edit to see exactly what you did. There are several good reasons for not leaving it blank. One is that a blank raises suspicion among diligent readers, who may be more inclined to revert your edit if they have to open it and don't like it or don't understand it. Another reason is that in some circumstances there will be an automatic summary containing about the first 200 characters of the edit, which makes "Recent changes" longer and harder to read. So it is recommended that all diligent users set their user preferences (under "Editing") to "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary". It can include internal and interwiki links but not external links, formatting, or nowiki or HTML tags. It cannot be edited after the page is saved, and it cannot be searched for within the wiki or found by search engines. See also Details on "Meta" *'Footnotes' - notes that can be placed on the bottom of an article to reference certain statements. Here we already have Template:Fn and at least one related template. But that Wikipedia one has gone out of favour/favor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Fn. In at least one New Zealand publishing house, footnotes and references are used for different purposes. Court judgments sometimes use footnotes and must be reproduced faithfully even though there are some difficulties when the end product is online. There seems to be no reason why Wikia should stop using footnotes. Central Wikia now has a relevant extension that we can use: see http://help.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Cite. Editing As with all wikis, you can edit any non-protected page. Your changes will be visible immediately. Just click the "edit" link that appears at the top or bottom of every page. Explain your edit in the "Summary" box beside the edit window, eg: "typo" or "info on xyz". Use the [preview|"Preview" button to check your edit and get the formatting right before saving. Remember to publish your preview before moving on. If an emergency happens, try to save the page or paragraph to a separate wordprocessing program as a backup (but you may have odd things happen to apostrophes). If you are , you can mark an edit as minor by checking the This is a minor edit box to let people know your edit is not something substantive. Trying out your new skills To try editing, open a new window and go to the Genealogy:Sandbox (which is an editing test area), and then click the "edit" link. Add something and click "Save". External editors See the Central Wikia page. Formatting Most text formatting is usually done with wiki markup, so you don't have to learn although you can use it for most things if you wish. Bold and italics Bold and italics are added either by using the buttons near the start of the edit-tools bar above the edit box, or by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('): *''italics'' is rendered as italics. (2 apostrophes on each side) *'bold' is rendered as bold. (3 apostrophes on each side) *''bolded italics'' is rendered as bolded italics. (2 + 3 = 5 apostrophes on each side) Headings and subheadings Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organisation of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up your article by inserting a heading for each section. Headings can be created like this: * Main heading (2 equals signs) * Subheading (3 equals signs) * Another level down (4 equals signs) * Another level down (5 equals signs) If an article has at least three headings, a table of contents (TOC) will be automatically generated. Try creating some headings in the sandbox and see the effect on the TOC. Indenting To indent text, place a colon (:) at the beginning of a line. The more colons you put, the further indented the text will be. A newline (pressing Enter or Return) marks the end of the indented paragraph. For example: This is aligned all the way to the left. ::This is indented slightly. :::This is indented more. is shown as: This is aligned all the way to the left. :This is indented slightly. ::This is indented more. Bullet points To insert a bullet, use an asterisk (*) right at the start of the line. Similarly to indentation, more asterisks give more indentation. A brief example: :*First list item :*Second list item :**Sub-list item under second :*Isn't this fun? Which is shown as: :*First list item :*Second list item :**Sub-list item under second :*Isn't this fun? Numbered lists You can also create numbered lists. For this, use the number sign or hash symbol (#). Using more #s will affect the level of indenting. Example: :#First item :#Second item :##Sub-item under second item :#Third item Shows up as: :#First item :#Second item :##Sub-item under second item :#Third item Mix numbers and bullets and indents Experiment. Not always displayed as you might want. Use sparingly if at all. Dashes As of MediaWiki 1.5, -- and - are rendered as emdashes or endashes depending on the context. The terms 'emdash' and 'endash' refer to the length of the dash. Originally, an 'emdash' was the length of the letter 'M', while an 'endash' was the length of the letter 'N'. See Wikipedia:Dash. Links Links are important on wikis to help readers navigate your site. Internal links Introduction You can extensively cross-reference wiki pages using internal links. You can link to existing page titles, and also to words or phrases you think ought to be future page titles. How to To make a link to another page on the same wiki, just put the title in double square brackets. You can do that fast if your browser shows you an edit bar above the edit box: the third button, marked "Ab", creates a link out of whatever is highlighted; if nothing is highlighted, it gives you a set of brackets ready to type in. For example, if you want to make a link to, say, the Wikia page, it would be: :Wikia Pipes for alternative names If you want to use words other than the article title as the text of the link, you can make your text display the alternative name by adding it after the pipe "|" divider (SHIFT + BACKSLASH on English-layout and some other keyboards). For example, if you wanted to make a link to Wikia, but wanted it to say "Central home page" you would write it like this: :View the Central home page... It would appear as: :View the Central home page... Plurals When you want to use the standard (-s or -es) plural of an article title (or add any other suffix) for your link, you can add the extra letters directly outside the double square brackets. For example, you would write: :Add questions to the Wikia for quizzes. It would appear as: :Add questions to the Wikia for quizzes. Some Wikia are available in multiple languages. To add a link in the sidebar from an article on the English Wikimac to the German version of the same article, for example, type: :de:iPod "De" is the language code for German. The link will appear in the sidebar as "Deutsch" and link to The German WikiMac iPod article. This only works on wikis with multiple languages on different sites. To link to another Wikia site, you can sometimes use its title followed by a colon and the article name, instead of using the full URL. For example, the creatures wiki home page is at Creatures:Main Page, which can be typed as :Creatures:Main Page :rather than as http://creatures.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page This style of link works for any wiki in the interwiki map, not just for Wikia. . However, for most Wikia sites you now need a format like this: w:c:newzealand:pagename External links Full URL option If you want to link to a site outside of Wikia, you may simply type (or preferably paste) the full URL for the page you want to link to, eg: :http://www.google.com/ Piped link option It is often more useful to make the link display something other than the URL, so use one square bracket at each end, with the alternative title after the address separated by a space (not a pipe). So if you want the link to appear as Google search engine, just type: :Google search engine Redirects To redirect automatically from one page to another in the same wiki, type #REDIRECT and then put in double square brackets the name of the page to be redirected to. For example, you could redirect from "Cats" to "Cat". That way, anyone typing either version in the search box will automatically go to "Cat". If the target page is itself a redirect, the software will not go the whole way; so check the target page. The edit tools have a one-click shortcut for #REDIRECT [[]]. Wiki variables and templates Use to see the current Wikia. For instance, on this site prints out as . Similar "magic words", used in most sites using MediaWiki software, include - which reproduces the page name - and - which does the same except for cutting off any namespace prefix such as "Help:" or "User:". You can also create your own templates. After someone creates the page Template:XXX, anyone using the command will include that content in the page being edited. So, if you have something that needs to be included on many other pages, you might want to use a template. One can include templates within templates, but this can have odd results and puts more load on the server, so should be used judiciously. If you want to copy just the current form of a model page and then want to be able to edit the result, not to have it change after every change of the model, use "subst:" at the start of the template after the opening brackets. Special tags and templates Highlight box This. gives: This. A similar effect is available using Template:Dottedbox. Signatures You should sign a contribution on a Talk or Forum page. For just your User name, type three tildes (~~~). Better usually is to type four of them (or click the "signature" symbol in the edit bar if your browser shows one); this adds a timestamp, which helps readers know whether your contribution was before or after nearby paragraphs. Here's what our has changed his signature to, by using . It provides folks with a direct link to his Talk page to reply and so on (remove spaces in the nowiki tags): < nowiki >< / nowiki >]]—iFaqeer (Talk to me!) Example: [[User:iFaqeer|—iFaqeer (Talk to me!) 13:32, 28 October 2005 (PDT) Special characters * There are handy lists at: :http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp :and :http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=HTML%20symbol%20reference Further places to go * MediaWiki Editor Handbook, the help pages for the software we're using * WikiPedia help contents * * * List of Templates Discussion pages Discussion or "talk" pages are for communicating with other Wikians. To discuss any page, go to that page and then click the "discussion" tab at the top or side or bottom of the page. Add a new comment either under a new heading at the end, or indented (see below) below the comment you are replying to. Sign your comments by typing ~~~~ to insert your username and a timestamp. For more detail of signatures, see . Use indenting with colons to format your discussion. Standard practice is to indent your reply one more level deep than the person you are replying to. Experiment by editing the talk page of the sandbox. User talk pages Every contributor has a user talk page, on which other people can leave public messages. If someone has left you a message, you will see a note saying "You have new messages", with a link to your user talk page. You can reply on the user talk page of the person you're replying to or on your own talk page beneath the original message. If you reply on their talk page, they will receive notification of it. See also *More Wikia help pages :* :* :* *Policies *Common mistakes *MediaWiki User's Guide *Wikipedia tutorial *An annotated Wikipedia article Editing Category:Multilingual translations needed Category:Pages in English